Modern love the podcast is supported by the for the work messages begin to pour in. Let's give ourselves a good morning. A good morning is a moment to pause and ease into the day. It's a moment to run and chase the sun rise, or it's a gently settle into your in a good morning as a moment to be present, to find clarity and be grounded for the day had good days start with good mornings and good mornings start with Yogi T Yogi T tease me to do more than just tastes, good from the New York Times and W B or Boston. This is modern stories of love, loss and redemption. I'm your host Megan

everybody. The hospital pediatrics wing is a place of pain and resilience, fear and healing. Normally families are therefore purely medical reasons, but for Thomas Hoover in the hospital became a space for a different kind of recovery, Jake, Gyllenhaal stars in the new movie stronger and he reads a nurse A wound in an appropriate setting, I started my pediatrics resin. See on the cardiology unit, which was appropriate, my heart had a giant hole in it. Just after I, graduated from medical, cool. As I was moving into my fiance's New York apartment

she ended our relationship. We went out to dinner that night and after we came home, she told me we were through she and I had been together. Twelve years engaged for two, we had a wedding plan for three weeks later. I can't believe you're doing this. I said from the edge of her bed, I know, will always be best friends. She said I left just after sunrise suitcase in hand feeling as if I had just fallen from a moving train, it seemed unimaginable that I was meant to report for duty at the hospital.

a month my new employers were expecting a freshly minted physician. Full of knowledge and an eagerness to heal as it was I can barely remember my name yeah. I took a cab to the airport and booked a flight to my father's house in Minnesota and stayed there until it was time to limp back to New York. Just my residency. I spent the hour that was supposed to have in our wedding ceremony sitting in the crook of a tree staring at the suburban horizon. The evening was silent. The weather was perfect.

After returning from Minnesota, I moved to a marginal block in the neighborhood of highway access ramps and overpasses plastic bags, blue along the empty streets brief walks to and from the hospital and solitary meals with dust, motes swirling in my sparse living room where all that interrupted the otherwise constant blur of rounding on patients in the dim morning, hours writing hundreds of medical orders and updating parents who ranged from frantic to silently resigned. There are rules the number of hours of training physician can work in a hospital, but the limit remains high. Eighty hours a week when done back to back and filled with children suffering from complex illnesses. Weeks like that tend to metastasize.

leaving room for nothing else. When I started my work as a doctor, it took every bit of concentration to put aside my private sadness and focus on my patience. I was lost and it's a wonder. I didn't hurt anyone. In moments of downtime, and especially in the depths of night, when the unit was quiet, memories of my ex and my longing for her would overtake me, like a persistent virus. Loneliness lived inside me my ex and I had gone to the same high school as two children of divorce who had been caught between battling parents. We were drawn to each other like compatriots. We held on to our young romance through for years at supper, colleges and journeyed across the country to attend graduate school together.

We seemed on the cusp of the grown up lives. We had imagined. Actually we were about to disintegrate. As a couple we did not our relationship was conceived from. Need for security and stayed small quiet and safe,

We came together in the disorienting haze of parental conflict and from the start, we shared a tacit assumption that fighting men losing love at the end, surrounded by cardboard boxes. We had spent the day hauling into her living room. I asked over and over why she was leaving me. She couldn't articulate a single reason. I don't know she said after more than a decade together that non answer. Amazed me it seemed the most brutal response possible.

But now, more than five years later, her response seems less surprising and more diagnostic of why we failed. Our relationship had never developed the vocabulary necessary to express the many colors and intricacies of adult emotion. We had no language for negativity. She must have sense that and realized. We were headed for serious trouble compared with many of my patients that year whose illnesses complications and treatment regimens would fill a textbook. My burden of heartache was Still my patience and I inhabited a space in the city together at a time when we were suffering a hospital is a place for that simultaneous suffering.

I remember a fifteen year old boy with severe renal failure, tubes through his flank, straining your indirectly from his ravaged kidneys. his mother rarely visit him over the many months that he spent admitted every night. He would mount dramatic protests about the frequent injections his disease required,

one time is howling scream summit made of the hallway it was after midnight, crouched and sobbing against. The wall had buried in his palms. He looked barely older than seven. I sat on the floor next to him and put my hand on his shoulder. We stayed there for about fifteen minutes me and my scrubs him and his thin, yellow gown with clowns on it, both isolated amid the nurses, medications and monitors after that he returned to his room, took the shots and went to bed, and I went back to the tiny sleeping quarters for overnight staff and traipse into the past scrolling through old emails from my van

fiancee and waiting for dawn healing come slowly, but it comes a budding. Pediatrician must observe lives cut inexplicably short, the fourteen year old girl with cardio myopic. He who had a heart attack before my eyes and died staring at the ceiling but have also been privileged to witness how most gravely ill children overcome or bypass their challenges they mature they become writer. They pick up idiots increases.

They smile despite themselves. My patience and I also healed together for me healing, started to desire to be a better doctor. The drive to improve my skills as a physician to recognize diagnoses, no disease mechanisms and determine the correct treatments, treatment, Boeing and revenge. We pulled me out of my sight. The long days that were at first such a sicilian cycle became a new refuge for a time. The study and practice of medicine was, I only and perfect pepper.

Some time during my second year of residency, I emerged from the elevator to see the boy with Reno failure cruising down the hallway using the wheeled base of his ivy pole as a skateboard, he had a paper airplane in his hand and tossed it as he approached laughing as it looped past my head. He was getting better.

And so was I my ex and I are not in touch our relationship so long in the making, and so quick to end was like an ornamental piece of crystal aesthetically pleasing but lacking resilience and once shattered irrecoverable. Looking back at the various romantic and not so romantic dating experiences, I had afterwards it's hard to separate my growth as an emotionally conversant partner from my development as a capable physician, both happened.

simultaneously and gradually through stretches of triumph and sorrow. There were no Eureka moments and neither ever really ended.

The turmoil I experienced as an intern left me with a deeper understanding of how pain works, how it feels how it ebbs and how it leaves you less naive. I also learned open up two important facets of life that my previous relationship had locked out. Unhappiness uncertainty, regret, comfort, around feelings like these is crucial in both medicine and intimate relationships. It's the basis of empathy. I didn't understand that before

My ex left me and I learned the hard way by the time I met my wife. I was a changed man and a real doctor. And our love develop differently from any. I had ever experienced the four less like a crystal vase. More like a basketball. Our relationship is made for bouncing for good and sometimes rough play that modern professional lives generate. We do have fights, yes, we do, but they do not threaten our fan

In a deep in it I would not return to those difficult and lonely days any more than I imagined my young patients now grown would return to the wards where I labored to keep them alive and well, but I would not choose to have avoided that experience either. The I ran into the kid with renal failure on the street a while back. He was with a bunch of his pals. It had been years since he left the hospital, and frankly I wouldn't have recognized him. He had filled out his.

chronically ill little boy's face, had developed into a sly winking young man's his skin had darkened from sun. He was addressed in a denim jacket, with a Bob Marley shirt underneath dark. He called out hey doc. We stood there talking for a few minutes enough for me to learn. He was finishing high school and doing well somewhere nearby, an ambulance siren wailed. I watched him walk away to rejoin his friends and then turned to enter the children's hospital. The I the

I Jake Gyllenhaal reading Tom, Vince essay nursing a wound in an appropriate setting coming up Tom gives us enough. eight on his career and his love life. I came packaged with a lot of fears, believe me, but she accepted that and seemed to see me and she does to this day the in the.

This pod cast is supported by the new Showtime original documentary, Cyprus, Hill. Insane in the brain part of show times hip hop fifty celebration, Grammy nominated Group, Cyprus, Hills, unique ability to blend hip hop in ROC, had icons from all over the map, praising them as profits of illegal we'd movement. Cyprus held defied the stigma of the nineties and cemented their legacy as hip hop superstars Cyprus Hill Insane in the brain preparing this for twenty only on Showtime, I laugh out my friend and I often place telling me, together by together, I mean sitting next to each other playing individually and not cheating. Sometimes when I open up spelling bee- and I see that you have completed a few words on your own, I feel a little betrayed in ferry. They may have happened. I have one friend who I will say

in the screenshots from spelling bee of inappropriate words that I always get nervous that I sent it to my parents or something like that was my bad. It was the first time together and I was out. I think I got to see it J. A c k, p o t Jack, finally hit nice I'm same is asking the digital puzzles editor for the New York Times. You can try, spelling bee and all our games at annoying times dot com, flash games, we're back. It's modern love, the podcast cast a magnet everybody, Thomas Hooven is married now, and he has two children he's finished his medical nothing and is now a new Natalia, just a pediatrician whose specializes in caring for infants his work, continues to teach him as much about love and relationships. As about medicine in science. My job lets me me

people and become involved with families at moments in their life that are scary and significant, probably beyond anything else that will ever. into them, and it's a tremendous privilege for me to be involved at that time and through helping families through times like this I continually learn more about what it feels like to be in pain. How empathy helps that pain and how it helps people get through really trying times and just before his essay was published in the new year. Times Tom reached out to his former fiance. I sent her an email saying I had written this and that I had tried to be fair to her. I hope she saw it that way.

She wrote back a really warm email and said: congratulations. She said that she always thought I was an excellent writer and then the ESA came out, and I wondered how it landed with her, but I never heard she never sent me anything which I consider absolutely. Prerogative, I imagine that for her it's hard to contact me in the same way that for a long time it was hard and painful to contact her. So I don't blame her for that. So Tom learned a lot of lessons from his experience. I hope the people reading it will take from it if they're in that situation, that you'll emerge and you're actually emerge a better partner and healthier partner than you would have otherwise been. I really believe that he knows that

because he can see it in his relationship with his wife. I think I sensed in her the same understanding around the need to communicate openly she's a great communicator in every respect and As our relationship built, it happened differently than had happened before it was much more intentional and based on talking everything through all the feelings that we had and all the fears that we had and I came packaged with a lot of fear Believe me, but she accepted that and seemed to see me and she does to this day. The Tom Hooven lives in New York City with his family. He still works at Columbia, University, medical center, the same hospital where he did his residency

We up some thoughts from Daniel Jones, editor of the modern love column for the New York Times and more from Jake Gyllenhaal, I love spelling my boyfriend and I often play spelling bee together by together I mean sitting next other playing individually and not cheating. Sometimes when I open up spelling bee- and I see that you have completed a few words on your own, I feel a little betrayed in sorry. It may have happened. I have one friend who I will say:

in the screenshots from spelling bee of inappropriate words that I always get nervous that I sent it to my parents or something like that was my bad. It was the first time together and I was out. I think I got to see it J, a c k, P, o t. Jack, finally hit nice. I'm same as earth's sky. The digital puzzles editor for the New York Times. You can try, spelling bee and all our games at N Y Times dot com, Slash Games Dan Jones says that he was struck by how Thomas who wins idea of love changed after his relationship with his ex ended. Love for them was escaping conflict. And he articulates that that didn't allow their relationship to have conflict and

This is such a sort of smart articulation of your. What love require there's an that. Love is a more and tumble thing and how he learns that by being in this house, while setting and what moving journey that was sort of come out. The other end of this just brutal experience with It's not only a greater understanding of what love is but being able to describe what that understanding is to other people almost like the doctor, as teacher in this case. Jake Gyllenhaal says that he found Tom humans as a deeply moving. Someone said to me recently to treat everyone that you meet as if they've had a broken heart and I feel like I don't always live that way, and if I did, I think I would live a much richer and fuller and happier life.

that's where I want to get too. So I think this story just shows us that the only way to being human that we wish to be is inevitably through some pain, Jake Gyllenhaal. He stars in the new movie stronger next week. Ann Dowd reads the story of a woman watching the man she married go through a gender transition it wasn't until we were married that my husband finally feeling loved admitted to himself that he was transsexual, that he was inside a woman that he did not want to be the man I married Modern love is the production of the New York Times and W B you are Boston, NPR station, its produced, directed and edited by Jessica.

John Parodi, Emory secrets in and Caitlin O Keefe extra help this week from producer Katharine, brewer The idea for the modern love podcast was conceived by LISA Tobin, Iris Adler's, our executive producer, Daniel Jones is the editor of modern love for the New York Times and adviser to the show music for the part cast courtesy of a pm I'm making Taco Party see you next week.